4 ms·

It's nearly free if they simply changed their archiving process from deleted to read-only with a giant red banner warning at the top. Both expend the same amoun

by Salgat 2y ago

It's nearly free if they simply changed their archiving process from deleted to read-only with a giant red banner warning at the top. Both expend the same amount of effort to do.

close04 2y ago
The entire deletion exercise was probably to thwart AI training related scraping but the fallout was greater than expected. "Old forum posts on some storage" are an insignificant expense for a company of that size in terms of storage/infrastructure, and even less significant as effort to manage the forum.
- reginald78 2y ago
  Ironically it probably helped AI since the previously slurped up forum data is then only available when regurgitated from one of the models that was trained on it before it was taken down.
  - selimthegrim 2y ago
    Ssssh talk softly, you’l upset the senior engineer’s clever retirement plan
8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
Building a read only mode into a product not designed with that in mind is more effort than deleting.
- vanderZwan 2y ago
  This argument would make sense if you weren't talking about forums, where archiving is as simple as locking the entire forum. Heck you could even scrape + convert to static HTML like what they did with the original Processing forums. Which is run by volunteers.
  - notachatbot123 2y ago
    You would definitely need to convert to static HTML or the forum software would be exploited at some point in the future. Doing that while keeping URLs intact is not trivial. I totally get your point and am pro non-deletion, but it really is way less work to just delete it all.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- sleepybrett 2y ago
  yeah running wget in spider mode is ROUGH. It's probably a month of work for anyone competent to produce a static version of ALL of the posts.
  - virginwidow 2y ago
    Ignore this remark if irrelevant But f00kin'AYE on wget. I can't say for certain (please pard0n) but if there was anyway to (ya, right) find we'd learn way back when 'AutoCad' was originaly built (and for) UNIX. Because LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses) was an emacs dealio, Richard Stahlman stuff but I suspect even before Torvalds built Linux... When 8086/88 machines went viral there was a (hardware) limit <640K (kb) RAM. To escape this we used 'PharLap' to make a 16mb (megabytes) Ramdisk look like "REAL" to Autocad... It'd be amusing to know how the UNIX app was ported to 8086/88 (before 'Windows' 3)
    - sleepybrett 2y ago
      Turns out that wget is still great for spidering.

by Salgat 2y ago

It's nearly free if they simply changed their archiving process from deleted to read-only with a giant red banner warning at the top. Both expend the same amount of effort to do.

close04 2y ago

The entire deletion exercise was probably to thwart AI training related scraping but the fallout was greater than expected. "Old forum posts on some storage" are an insignificant expense for a company of that size in terms of storage/infrastructure, and even less significant as effort to manage the forum.

reginald78 2y ago
Ironically it probably helped AI since the previously slurped up forum data is then only available when regurgitated from one of the models that was trained on it before it was taken down.
- selimthegrim 2y ago
  Ssssh talk softly, you’l upset the senior engineer’s clever retirement plan

8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago

Building a read only mode into a product not designed with that in mind is more effort than deleting.

vanderZwan 2y ago
This argument would make sense if you weren't talking about forums, where archiving is as simple as locking the entire forum. Heck you could even scrape + convert to static HTML like what they did with the original Processing forums. Which is run by volunteers.
- notachatbot123 2y ago
  You would definitely need to convert to static HTML or the forum software would be exploited at some point in the future. Doing that while keeping URLs intact is not trivial. I totally get your point and am pro non-deletion, but it really is way less work to just delete it all.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sleepybrett 2y ago
yeah running wget in spider mode is ROUGH. It's probably a month of work for anyone competent to produce a static version of ALL of the posts.
- virginwidow 2y ago
  Ignore this remark if irrelevant But f00kin'AYE on wget. I can't say for certain (please pard0n) but if there was anyway to (ya, right) find we'd learn way back when 'AutoCad' was originaly built (and for) UNIX. Because LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses) was an emacs dealio, Richard Stahlman stuff but I suspect even before Torvalds built Linux... When 8086/88 machines went viral there was a (hardware) limit <640K (kb) RAM. To escape this we used 'PharLap' to make a 16mb (megabytes) Ramdisk look like "REAL" to Autocad... It'd be amusing to know how the UNIX app was ported to 8086/88 (before 'Windows' 3)
  - sleepybrett 2y ago
    Turns out that wget is still great for spidering.